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I remember that until about 5 years ago the man-program could not handle man pages in utf-8 but expected ISO-character-sets.

Maybe the Gentoo version of man still has this problem. You may look into other german man pages, that display correctly, if there is anything different with them. Especially wether they are utf-8 or ISO encoded.

Your tests with konqueror indicate that your man program expects ISO-8859-1 encoding, like konqueror when you set encoding to ISO-8859-1.

If you want to change the encoding of the german davfs2 man pages you need the program po4a that is used to create the translated man pages:

- cd into the man directory (not man/de)
- edit file po4a.conf and change the desired encoding for the german man pages
- run 'po4a -v po4a.conf'
- now build and install the package as usual

In any case you may contact some Gentoo developers. They will now how german man pages have to bee encoded or wether there is something special about them. They also will be able to change Gentoo ebuild for davfs2 if necessary.

But if the problem is as I suspect they might also have a look at Debian to see how Debian solved the problem. (Debian displays may german man pages correctly)

I do realize that the man pages are UTF-8 encoded -- the problem is that, for some reason, this information is not being communicated to the console man reader properly, so that it displays the pages in ISO 8859-1, which results in the strange characters.

Remember that they display normally in konqueror, where the encoding is set to "standard" -- on this system, at least, that is UTF-8. If I set the encoding to ISO 8859-1, then the result is an output that looks just like what I get on the console, with the strange characters.

Gentoo package maintainers sent me here, but if we can determine that the problem is with the environment or the package build itself, I would be happy to go back to them with this information.

That's strange.
The german davfs2 man pages are in utf-8 for many years now and I never heard of that. My own system has an utf-8 locale and shows tha man pages correctly.

Where did you get your package from and how did you build it?

I just looked at files man/de/davfs2.conf.5 and man/de/mount.davfs.8 in source package 1.4.7 with a hex-editor. They are definitely in utf-8 (german umlauts are two bytes). Make will substitute some configure time variables in these files (using sed) and then process them with gzip. These files will be installed.